Descriptive Stats

Sample Size: Watched 103 movies in 2014. 68 were for the first time, 12 at the cinema.

Movie Consumption: On average watched 2 movies per week, or 8.5 per month.

Movie Ratings

Mean: 6.9 stars, Median: 7 stars

Max: No new 10’s this year, they were all favourites I was rewatching. Gone Girl and Guardians of the Galaxy were highest for this year (more below).

Min: 4 stars (Divergent)

Apparently I’m getting better at choosing movies too: Unlike last year where there were several things I hated (from memory I was actually doing this on purpose), this year there only a couple of movies that only slightly annoyed me (Divergent, The Hobbit etc).

Year of Release:

Mean: 2005, Median: 2010.

Min: 1968 (Once Upon a Time in the West)

Max: 2014 (20% of movies watched)

Still fighting a losing battle trying to catch up on the classics.

Favourite Genre: Action and Adventure, making up 67% of movies watched.

Thanks to this awesome post (found via Flowing Data) I have discovered a process known as databending. Basically you import an image file into Audacity, then modify the file as though it was an audio file.

Below are the results of databending a few photos this weekend. The echo, amplify and phaser effects seem to give the most interesting and immediate results, but there are countless others to experiment with.

Have made a few upgrades lately to the software toolchain and also what I was using to capture the images. My Canon SX280 is a great camera, but that 30 second exposure just wasn’t cutting the mustard…

As much fun as this has been to play around with, the print area is just too small! Using SketchUp I’ve come up with some designs for a new scaled up version using MakerBeam and pulleys (instead of threaded rods like current design).

This should give a total print area of about 250mm (as opposed to the 50mm I have now). If I put an SMD LED inside a small enclosure with a tiny 1mm hole, I should be able to decrease the width of the lines to further improve resolution as well. I figure at the moment the lines are about 3mm wide and the print area is 50mm wide. So that’s a resolution of about 17×17 pixels. With 250 x 250mm bed and a 2mm wide line that will give a 125×125 resolution, or 250×250 at 1mm wide lines.

Changes

Following my initial attempts, 5mm LEDs have been replaced with a set of 3mm LEDs to provide a little bit of extra resolution. Light pollution has been decreased a bit too by painting the bottom of the LEDs and some of the topmost surfaces of PCBs, stages.